Since I was curious about how sub-optimal the placement of the PNW District Championship was -- and because I'm an engineer that likes to overdo things -- I decided to do some calculations...
I threw the addresses of all of the teams in the PNW district into a geographic midpoint calculator (
www.geomidpoint.com). This calculates the "center of gravity" of all of the teams in the PNW (assuming equal weighting of each team).
The results weren't entirely surprising -- the DCMP site is over 200 miles from the average PNW FRC team.
The center of gravity of FRC in the PNW is about 7 miles due south of Mt. Rainer or (46.746897, -121.732176) if you're wanting to be exact. I say we just have it on top of Mt. Rainer next year -- snow game, anyone?
Here are some (straight line) distances from that center for reference:
- 51mi - FIRSTWA Headquarters, Kent, WA
- 65mi - Downtown, Seattle, WA
- 95mi - Memorial Colosseum, Portland, OR (this year's site)
- 200mi - Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA (next year's site)
That means that
the "average" PNW team will be travelling an extra 105mi to DCMP this year.
Here's the team map with addresses (from FIRSTWA):
PNW Team Map
Here's a Google map pinpoint of the location:
PNW District Team Midpoint